‘Laughter as a Political Coping Mechanism’ took place on March 28-29th, 2025, transforming the Confluence Lecture Theatre at Durham University into an arena for multiple languages, disciplinary approaches, and engulfing conversations about humour’s function as a deeply human form of resistance. Organisers Benedetta Carnaghi and Helen Roche were delighted with the turnout and the excellent papers, all devoted to exploring the political uses of humour.
Photo 1: Helen Roche (left) and Benedetta Carnaghi (right).
Carnaghi and Roche opened the conference with a joint keynote address. Carnaghi gave an overview of humour against Mussolini. The Fascist regime deployed a huge number of resources to prosecute whoever made fun of the Duce: If humour is prosecuted, Carnaghi asked, does that mean that dictators are afraid of it, and does that fear mean laughter can indeed be a powerful form of resistance?
Roche drew on her monograph on the Third Reich’s elite schools, taking as case studies moments of minor rebellion, in which pupils deployed subversive humour within the context of strict discipline and political conformism enforced by these ‘total institutions’. However, the extent of the pupils’ actions was quite circumscribed, and Roche concluded that we could not class it as ‘resistance’ in any meaningful sense.
The conference continued with a first panel on ‘Music and Performance’, featuring papers by Clare V. Church, Jessica Wardhaugh, and Klara Beetz.
Photo 2: from left to right, Vincent Trott (moderator), Klara Beetz, Jessica Wardhaugh, and Clare V. Church.
Church gave a fascinating talk on the Andrews Sisters who provided comedic relief to their soldierly audiences during the Second World War. Wardhaugh then took us to Vichy France, describing laughter as a weapon of the weak while delving into the extraordinary range of Vichy’s opponents. But, Wardhaugh asked, what if the authorities laugh too? Bringing the panel to a resounding finish, Klara Beetz turned to the 1970s and queer daily life and performance, speaking about the role of laughter in the travesty cabaret of East Berlin’s Hibaré—a way for individuals to joyfully reclaim their identities while facing persistent homo- and transphobia.
Post-lunch, the conference carried on with a panel about ‘Caricature and Visual Satire’; the presenters were Yuetong Li, Vincent Trott, Luciano Cheles, and Serena Vandi, and their papers stretched from Wilhelmine Germany to the US during WWI to satire in Italy.
Photo 3: from left to right, Katharina Friege (moderator), Serena Vandi, Luciano Cheles, Vincent Trott, and Yuetong Li.
Li showed how between 1874 and 1914, satirical publications in Germany significantly influenced public discourse and tested the limits of freedom of speech, holding authority accountable, facilitating public debate, and reflecting social values. Trott spoke on political humour in the United States from 1914 to 1917. He departed from the previous speakers’ focus on humour as resistance, exploring instead the power of humour as a tool of propaganda, ultimately paving the way for the American intervention in the First World War. Cheles turned to Italy, examining satirical cartoons and magazines from the 1920s to the present day, and offering an excellent overview of a century of political cartoons from all angles of commitment. Vandi remained on the Italian peninsula, discussing satire and power in two case studies—Carlo Emilio Gadda and Zerocalcare—teasing out the interplay of rationality and irrationality, lightness and seriousness, in both.
The last panel of the day was fully online and tackled the theme of ‘Humorous Resistance’, with Nhi Yen Le, Roman Mamin, Valentina Marcella, and Andrés Francisco Dapuez.
Photo 4: Xiaofei Tu (moderator) introduces the panel.
Le kicked things off with a paper on satire, censorship, and resistance in 1930s colonial Vietnam. Her analysis focused on the satirical publication Vịt Đực, which was not solely a source of humour and entertainment but also served as a significant platform for social and political commentary and critique. Mamin followed with a presentation on late Soviet jokes, using humour as a lens to examine the history of the late USSR: the act of performing a joke activated gender tuning and vulgarity, Soviet corporate solidarity, political resistance and friendship, emotional contact, and a sense of celebration. Marcella focused on humour and satire in Turkey, examining the culture of dissent that grew up in the early 1980s around the satirical magazine Gırgır. She then compared that success with the fate of satirical magazines in the 2010s, which seem to have lost their overall political potential. Finally, Dapuez spoke about hunger and jokes in Argentina. In 2021, a group of left-wing protesters wrote ‘basta de polenta’ in letters made of the eponymous grain in front of the Argentine Ministry of Social Development. Dapuez showed how such humorous acts challenged the ‘moral economy’ promoted by the Argentinian government.
The second day of the conference started with Alya Aglan’s wonderful keynote address, translated into English by Ben Fried.
Photo 5: Ben Fried (left) and Alya Aglan (right).
Aglan explained that humour could change the unbearable reality of war. Without words, humour often captured the essential, and the Resistance in Vichy France used it repeatedly. Jokes were easy to memorise and repeat by word of mouth, thus making humour an efficient weapon of counterpropaganda.
The first panel of this second day revolved around ‘Fascism and Dictatorship’, and featured papers by Francesco Saccà, Alexandra Oeser, Natalie Schwab, and Paolo Scotton and Raquel Cercós. Their talks ranged from Fellini’s antifascist writing to caricatures in Croatia, from poetry to laughter in the camps.
Photo 6: on the screen, Raquel Cercós (left) and Paolo Scotton (right); in the room, from left to right, Natalie Schwab, Francesco Saccà, Jessica Wardhaugh (moderator), and Alexandra Oeser.
Saccà began by examining comic writing and satire in Marc’Aurelio, an Italian anti-fascist magazine. The satire of Marc’Aurelio took place through what Federico Fellini, a young contributor to the newspaper and future star of Italian cinema, called ‘desecration of language’. This desecration was a subtle way of criticising Fascist rhetoric and ideology. Oeser spoke next, tackling one of the most difficult subjects: laughter in the concentration camps. Through Nina Jirsikova’s life and work, Oeser delved into laughter as a weapon of both oppression and resistance. Oeser’s remarkable presentation explored the varieties of laughter, from mockery that can be turned against other victims to mockery that targets the powerful. Schwabl presented on anticlerical caricatures in post-war Croatia (1945-1946), caricatures that also trageted the fascist Ustasha regime and the complicity of the clergy within it. Finally, direct from Barcelona, Scotton and Cercós spoke about the Catalan poet Joan Brossa, unpacking his career from the Civil War to Franco’s regime and onward to the return of democracy, tracing the fate of the wider Catalan avant-garde through Brossa’s life and work.
The second panel of the day was on ‘Postfascism’ and featured Sophie Dubillot, Katharina Friege, Simbarashe Marowa and Ushe Kufakurinani. Their papers covered topics from France to Zimbabwe, from visual humour to radio.
Photo 7: from left to right, Ushe Kufakurinani, Sophie Dubillot, Luciano Cheles (moderator), Katharina Friege, and Simbarashe Marowa.
Dubillot kicked things off with a paper on the visual humour created by returning French POWs and forced labourers in France after the liberation—a complex history of return, disappointment, and critical humour. Dubillot argued that most cartoons reveal their disappointment over the quality of their welcome, over not being celebrated like war heroes and martyrs of the Resistance. Friege picked up the baton and moved to radio comedy and the postwar scene—specifically radio in Great Britain and Western Germany from 1945 to 1960. She showed that for Britons and West Germans alike, radio comedies crafted a sense of post-war ‘normalcy’. At the same time, they also illuminated what was surreal in the post-war experience. Rounding off the panel, and taking the audience into the world of social media, Marowa and Kufakurinani presented on social media and humour in the case of Zimbabwe, bringing the house down with popular Zimbabwean jokes from Whatsapp, Facebook, and X. Social media is a release for so much pent-up expression, offering the citizens of repressive regimes semi-anonymous opportunities to interpret, reflect, and criticize.
The last panel tackled the difficult topic of “Humour in Extremis’, moving from Ukraine to the United States, with presentations from A. Austin Garey, Zlata Osipova, and Aidan Jones.
Photo 8: screen capture of this last online panel taken by Zlata Osipova.
Osipova spoke on the role of humour as a unifying force in Ukraine’s resistance. She discussed how humour operates in Ukraine on four key levels: psychological defense, national identity formation, information warfare, and maintaining social cohesion. Garey deepened the panel’s focus on Ukraine, comparing wartime British Punch cartoons with contemporary Ukrainian online memes. Both capture the absurdity of getting on with everyday life in the midst of war, praising ordinary heroes and lampooning the enemy. The last speaker of the conference, Jones, presented on laughter as a coping mechanism in a very unexpected place: death row in Texas prisons. Drawing on his interviews with death row inmates, Jones emphasised the importance of gallows humour in helping them cope with their condition. Many explicitly said that humour served a crucially therapeutic function in one of the most extreme situations of all.
In sum, the conference was wonderful: a two-day feast of papers that spoke to each other across media, languages, and periods. Moreover, each panel was followed by rigorous discussion—conversations that often carried into lunch and the evening. The organisers wish to thank all presenters, the audience, Durham University (especially the History Department), the German History Society (GHS), and the Association for the Study of Modern Italy (ASMI) for their generous sponsorship. The work of this conference will soon continue with the production of an edited volume.